Einstein@Home Set To Break Petaflops Barrier

hazeii writes "Einstein@home, the distributed computing project searching for the gravitational waves predicted to exist by Albert Einstein, looks set to breach the 1 Petaflops barrier around midnight UTC tonight. Put into context, if it was in the Top500 Supercomputers list, it would be in at number 24. I'm sure there are plenty of Slashdot readers who can contribute enough CPU and GPU cycles to push them well over 1,000 teraflops — and maybe even discover a pulsar in the process." From their forums: "At 14:45 we had 989.2 TFLOPS with an increase of 1.3 TFLOPS/h. In principle that's enough to reach 1001.1 TFLOPS at midnight (UTC) but very often, like yesterday, between 22:45 and 22:50 there occurs a drop of about 5 TFLOPS. So we will have very likely hit 1 PFLOPS in the early morning tomorrow. "

Comments

folding@home

[etash]

genuine question:

wouldn't it be wise for practical* reasons for people to offer more power to folding@home instead of einstein@home?



* = has more chances to help humanity ( for curing diseases etc. )

Re:folding@home

[gQuigs]

Discovery is not usually a straight line.

I donate to SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, LHC@Home, and a bunch of projects at WorldCommunityGrid. BOINC and GridRepublic makes this easy. I believe Folding@Home is a seperate standalone project, so it's all or nothing. In addition, there are a LOT of protein folding projects. I'd really like to see them work together - or explain why they are different.

Re:folding@home

[Enderandrew]

Someone who only knows physics might not be able to help medical research, so scientific resources aren't entirely fungible. But CPU cycles are. So contributing to one particular distributed computing project does carry an opportunistic cost of not supporting another.

Going off on a tangent here, while I echo your sentiment that people should be free to support whatever distributed computing project they want, I'm not sure people realize that SETI has basically already failed. They've covered their entire spectrum numerous times, and have been listening for decades without finding anything. The entire project operates off the assumption that interstellar communication of another intelligent life form would occur over radio waves.

Requisite XKCD:

http://xkcd.com/638/

If someone is contributing cycles to it, and not protein folding, then valuable medical research (that has been proven worthwhile) might be suffering literally out of ignorance. That is worth pointing out.

Re:folding@home

[Anonymous Coward]

No. But if we wanted, we could do both.

But play a little mind game. Imagine that you are a super genius, who could create a magical box within an hour. This box could create anything from nothing, even another similar box or cure for everything or food.

Would you rather spend your whole life helping Africa than inventing this box? Considering that with the box, you could help Africa also.

If yes, how about if it would take 2 hours? 4? A year?

But you are not a genius and the box is not a box. The box might be a robot that is based on technology that was invented when we tried to get to Mars. That is why we need to go to Mars, rather than help Africa with all we got.

Re:folding@home

[Enderandrew]

The concept of searching for extra-terrestrial life hasn't failed, but their project of just scanning radio waves basically has. If another civilization used radio for interstellar broadcasts, we'd see steady, regular broadcasts. When we blanket a spectrum from a physical direction and don't see anything, it suggests no one is broadcasting radio waves.

There may be technologically advanced life forms out there broadcasting by other means, but repeatedly checking radio waves probably won't offer any real benefit.

Re:folding@home

[RicktheBrick]

I have read that the latest supercomputer can do a Giga Flop per watt of computing. I do not think that any home computer will come close to that figure. Now if someone would calculate the total cost of doing this 1000 TFlops, I would think that it would be very close to the amount of purchasing a supercomputer and running it. 1,000 TFlops is around 5% of the fastest supercomputer today so one would assume that the supercomputer could do a lot more than just this program. Before 2020 1,000 TFops will be one tenth of one per cent of the computing power of the fastest supercomputer. I am familiar with other distributed computing programs and they usually require more than one volunteer to do any work, They compare the results from each volunteer to make sure that they have the correct results. Therefore 1,000 TFlops is probably at best equivalent to 500 TFlops. When one looks at all the factors, I would think that it would be better to ask for donations of money and purchase some time on a supercomputer. Even if the volunteer would only donate what they would save in electricity, I believe they would have enough.

Re:folding@home

[hAckz0r]

Different? Ok, "Go Fight Against Malaria" and "Say No To Schistosoma" are both trying to cure the #1 and #2 parasitic diseases worldwide.

Malaria is known to be in the US and has several medications to treat it. The CDC will tell you that Schistosoma does not even exist in the US, but I acquired it at the age of 10, and it wasn't until I purchased my own lab equipment around the age of 50 that I finally got an answer to all my bizarre health problems. Statistically I should be dead, several times over. Over 200,000 people die from it every year, and I am clearly one of the lucky ones.

There is currently only one drug (praziquantel) to "cure' (with 60% efficacy) Schistosoma, and it is quickly loosing its effectiveness. There is no other substitute. None. After visiting many pharmacies in my area, it took me three days for me to locate the drug in the USA and tell the Pharmacy where they could get it for me. . Yes Its that bad. Funny thing is I can buy it off the shelf for my dog, with a prescription, but I couldn't buy it anywhere for human consumption? Clearly we need more options and SNTS protein folding analysis will help with that goal.

If you have a few extra CPU cycles to spare, please sign up for one of these two worthy causes!

More info on Schistosomiasis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praziquantel

Re:folding@home

[camperdave]

Why not use a bacterial or yeast culture and let them fold actual proteins?

Re:folding@home

[mspohr]

Drugs for dogs are just as "pure" as those for humans.
On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.

Re:folding@home

[Aqualung812]

I'm not sure people realize that SETI has basically already failed. They've covered their entire spectrum numerous times

The entire spectrum? We've only looked at one frequency range on 20% of the sky:

SETI@home is basically a 21-cm survey. If we haven't guessed right about the alien broadcasters' choice of hailing frequency, the project is barking up the wrong tree in a forest of thousands of trees. Secondly, there has been little real-time followup of interesting signals. Lack of immediate, dedicated followup means that many scans are needed of each sky position in order to deal with the problem of interstellar scintillation if nothing else.

With its first, single-feed receiver, SETI@home logged at least three scans of more than 67 percent of the sky observable from Arecibo, amounting to about 20 percent of the entire celestial sphere. Of this area, a large portion was swept six or more times. Werthimer says that a reasonable goal, given issues such as interstellar scintillation, is nine sweeps of most points on Arecibo's visible sky.

Quoted from http://www.skyandtelescope.com/resources/seti/3304561.html?page=5&c=y

Also, when there is no work to be done, your computer can look at other things.

I donate my time to several medical studies that will likely find some results that will help all people. I also donate some time to climate research that has less of a chance of helping EVERYONE. I also donate some time to SETI which has a very, very small chance of changing the world.

It is called hedging your bets. I spend some CPU on things with low risk and low reward, and others on things with high risk and high reward.

Re:folding@home

[e_hu_man]

i don't think this is true at all. scanning radio waves seems just as viable a means as any other to me. my point is that we need to wait for far more than a few decades of silence before the statement "seti is a failure" should even enter our thinking. there may be a civilization making identical radios to our's right now and maybe they have been for as long as we have. but if they're 1,000 light years away (not very far in interstellar terms), decades of silence is the expected result.

Re:10001.1 TFLOPS, eh?

[Unknown Lamer]

I don't think the poster is a native speaker and I fixed a bunch of other obvious typos... but missed that extra zero there.

Re:Yeah no thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not actually producing bitcoin, you're just competing to win them. That is: nothing new is created by your participation in the bitcoin network, the best you can hope for is that you'll receive something which otherwise would've gone to someone else. It helps you personally, but is 0 sum for the world.

With einstein@home and folding@home, you are helping to solve big science problems. These problems will be solved faster with your help than without it. It is a net gain for science and humanity.

Re:10001.1 TFLOPS, eh?

[JustOK]

A zero is nothing, therefore you missed nothing.

Found /. through distributed.net back in the day

[gatzke]

The reason I found slashdot back in the 90s was due to the team performance on the distributed.net tasks. So they do turn those cycles into something useful!

Re:That's nothing..

[euyis]

Isn't Bitcoin's FLOPS number just an estimate, and a grossly inaccurate one based on the wrong assumptions that there's a single formula for estimating FLOPS with just integer performance, and the formula's applicable to all platforms?

Re:Top500 doesn't work that way

[kasperd]

You have to run the Linpack benchmark and report that.

And I guess no distributed computing platform is ever going to score in top 500 according to that benchmark. The communication performance between nodes is very important to most parallel algorithms. Any decent benchmark would take that into account. A real super computer has much faster communication between the nodes, than what you can achieve across the Internet. Both throughput and latency matters. There are some specific problems which can be split into parts that can be computed independently by nodes without communication between them, but most super computers are used for tasks, that do not fall into that class.

At some point I heard the rule of thumb, that when you are building a super computer, you divide your funds in three equal parts. One of those was to be spent on the interconnect. I don't recall what the other two were supposed to be spend on.

Re:Top500 doesn't work that way

[Anonymous Coward]

At some point I heard the rule of thumb, that when you are building a super computer, you divide your funds in three equal parts. One of those was to be spent on the interconnect. I don't recall what the other two were supposed to be spend on.

Hookers and blow.

Re:Any suggestions for a distributed client?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Folding@home uses its own specialized client. I've never used it, so I can't help you there. Most of the other distributed (grid) projects out there use the BOINC client. BOINC allows you to schedule processor time to when you want to run, allows the stoppage of distributed processes once CPU usage reaches a certain (user-definable) level, and all sorts of other things. I don't think Folding@home allows the BOINC client to connect, however.

I think what is happening (in your case) is the folding client is taking what you said quite literally, and treating the hyper-threaded cores as real cores. It filled up your 4 physical cores, causing your system to show 100% CPU usage while not utilizing your hyper-threaded cores. I think your OS and folding client are performing exactly as intended. If you truly want only two cores (plus their hyper-threaded cores) to fire, you'll either have to manually set your affinity on the folding tasks or simply tell the folding client to only use two cores.

You can try raising the issue in the help forums on Folding@home and see if they have a better solution.

Contributing spare cycles at the lowest CPU clock

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to contribute my spare CPU clock cycles, but without causing my CPU to speed up (in this case, with Intels SpeedStep) from the lowest setting at 800 MHz. Otherwise, my laptop gets hot and loud. How can I do that?

Re:10001.1 TFLOPS, eh?

[Abstrackt]

But he could have missed it to a higher degree of precision!

Not a barrier

[Lost Race]

1 PFLOPS is an arbitrary threshold or milestone. It's not a barrier because nothing special happens at that point. The speed of light is a barrier. Even the speed of sound is a barrier. 10^n somethings per whatever is rarely if ever a barrier for any positive integer n.

Re:1000.2 TFLOPS reached!

[hazeii]

2xGTX260 are in theory about 1.5TFLOPS so that's welcome fuel on the fire :)

You can also configure common settings using the BOINC preferences and Einstein@home preferences pages. It seems common to use "location" to set up different preferences for different hosts, e.g. I use "home" setting for machines which are only good for GPU work, "work" for CPU-only systems and the "default" setting for both CPU/GPU (plus "school" settings for experimentation).

Also AIUI the latest client will use all your GPUs as long as they have identical capabilities - so it should use both your GTX260's. You do have to twiddle the XML for stuff like mixed GPU usage, but I've never found the drivers stable enough for that to work well (at least on my ragtag fleet of PCs). I'd hazard a guess it would get tricky if you throw "GPU utilization" into the mix (i.e. running multiple work units on the same GPU, which can speed things up - see the benchmarks thread). Anyway, sounds like you're doing more advanced stuff after one night than anything I've attempted to date.